The Berlin Wall has come to symbolize the division of Europe, and of Germany, during the Cold War; its erection is taken to reflect the capriciousness and violence of the state socialist regimes, its fall the moment of liberation from dictatorship. The value of Sheffer's book lies in the way it turns from symbolism and high politics to the actual function of a border in everyday life. Instead of looking at Berlin, Sheffer shifts attention to the border between Bavaria and Thuringia, and the two sister cities Neustadt and Sonneberg, interlinked sites of toy production connected by a small bridge originally made of charred wood that would become the borderland between eastern and western Europe. Certainly big power politics shaped the development of this border; but, the book convincingly shows, local people also acted on their own to shape, to give meaning to, even to demand a wall between east and west. That “wall” remains, both politically and psychologically, even decades after the unification of East and West Germany.

The details matter in a history such as this one, and Sheffer has assiduously combed through fifteen archives and dozens of newspapers in addition to carrying out some fifty interviews with local residents and gaining access to the private papers of twenty-four of them. In addition, she mailed out a detailed survey to 500 residents of the two cities selected at random. With this impressive database, she is able to reconstruct not only the details of events that remain in people's minds, but also those that largely disappeared from public memory. Her book organizes these details in three temporal parts.

Between 1945 and 1952, the populations on both sides of the border experienced the chaos and violence of postwar occupation as well as the process of forming new states. Rape, robbery, and murder were part of both occupation regimes at first, though they persisted in the east for a longer time. And the border aggravated the problems: Sheffer shows how either side of the border became a site of violence, especially by the Soviet soldiers, how reports of bodies found—of women raped and then shot—appeared in newspapers through 1947. Smuggling in both directions developed as well as did movement of refugees in both directions, but especially toward the west. No wonder, then, that the physical border “expanded in people's imaginations—and concentrated postwar anxieties” (p. 47): it was not merely symbolic of disorder, it was a means of disorder. The 1947 currency reforms increased the profitability of smuggling and prefigured the 1949 formation of two separate states. Both east and west made use of unification rhetoric, especially when it came to recruiting or retaining skilled workers. Both worked to consolidate the border, especially when it came to excluding undesirable elements of the population. Sheffer points out well how the SED manipulated public opinion with soccer games between the cities on each side of the border, how it even organized mass crossings of citizens from the east to the west; these crossings, however, took on a life of their own, leading to attempts to bring them to a halt by both the East German People's Police and Bavarian authorities. For both sides, the border was intended to bring order; for both sides, it brought continued disorder, “violence, smuggling, migration, and political hostilities” (p. 94). The border helped to produce the very problems that would lead officials to strengthen it.

Sheffer deftly connects the local history of the border with the related histories of East and West Germany. In the east, for example, consolidation of the socialist regime made stronger border controls even more necessary, at the least to control the flight of skilled workers. The attempt to seal the border from the east in spring 1952 was accompanied by mass deportations inland of supposedly unreliable elements of the population. The narrative reminds one of some of the forced migrations of the 1930s, not only in its arbitrary nature but also in its lack of planning and unintended consequences, as one village, for example, simply chose to relocate to the west. The next nine years saw continuing migrations westward, though now often through Berlin, and an ever more complex system of surveillance, special passports, and regulations on border communities, all designed to halt border movements. The consolidation of the Stasi was closely related to the need to monitor the population in the east and the concern over espionage from the west. And the population often collaborated in these regime practices in exchange for special payments or privileges.

The final section of the book deals with the period after the construction of the Berlin Wall, when the border between Sonneberg and Neustadt was mined and more tightly controlled than before. While exchanges persisted, they were more limited; between 1961 and 1989, the two sides became ever more distinct and distant. The closed border certainly managed conflict between east and west during the Cold War; it also resulted in social differences that would make themselves manifest in the period after German Unification, when increased contact resulted paradoxically in increased estrangement. “Ironically,” Sheffer writes, “Sonnebergers and Neustadters appeared most at odds when the border was open and felt closest when it was closed” (p. 249).

Going far beyond attempts to get at Cold-War culture through abstract statistics, political histories, or displays of consumer goods, this study reveals the Cold War as a lived experience. It succeeds well in connecting the Cold War as a process in international relations with the life of the people at its front.